The song has sold 661,500 copies in the United Kingdom, as of January 2016. Jonas Blue – Fast Car. Blue stated, “When I was growing up, it was just a very varied type of music. My dad schooled me on soul, funk, disco, things like that.

So it was a very varied sound growing up, lots of different big acts, and great songwriters. Regarding “Fast Car”, Chapman’s original 1988 hit is a favorite of Blue’s mother’s, who would often play it in the car. And it just kind of stuck with me. It was that song on the long journeys, and I loved it. Regarding Dakota, who provides vocals on the song, Blue said, “I met Dakota with my manager. I had actually finished the instrumental of ‘Fast Car’, and we were looking for a singer. But on this particular night, we went out, we weren’t obviously looking for the singer.

We just went to this pub for a beer, and this pub is kind of renowned for its new acts and unsigned artists and things like that. So, we’re upstairs having a beer and all of a sudden we hear this voice from the basement downstairs of this pub, and I said, ‘We’ve got to go down and check whoever that is up. We went downstairs and Dakota was there, and we never met her before. At the end of the show, went up to her and said, ‘I’ve done this cover of ‘Fast Car’ and I think you’d be great on it.

And she , ‘Oh, I’ve never done dance music before or anything like that so, I’m not kind of sure. And I was like, ‘Listen, you’d be great. And she came the next day to record it, and what you hear on the radio is her coming in the next day after her show to record it. Blue also admitted that he wanted to create a Swedish-esque sound on the record: “I think with things like the synth lead lines in it, giving it that second hook, I was kind of going for a very kind of Swedish-y kind of sound. That’s kind of the influence behind that kind of lead synth line, and that was something which I don’t think people have picked up on yet, but they just like the song because of what it is. Its UK peak meant it charted higher than Chapman’s original, which peaked at number five on the chart in May 1988 and a position higher upon a re-release in April 2011.